Your First Challenge: A 10-Minute Setup Guide

Create an event and invite your friends in about ten minutes — start to finish.

Setting up a challenge on Miles with Friends is quick: a couple of minutes to create it, and a few more to invite the people you want along for the ride. That second part is the fun part — it's what turns a personal goal into something you do together. Here's the whole process, start to finish.

Before you start

Part 1: Create your event (about 2 minutes)

Open MY EVENTS and click CREATE A NEW EVENT. A short form opens right on the page with five fields — and only three of them are required.

The MY EVENTS panel on Miles with Friends with a Select an event dropdown and the CREATE A NEW EVENT button — Open **MY EVENTS** and click **CREATE A NEW EVENT** to get started.

Event name (required)

Make it yours: "March Walking Challenge," "Riverside Run Club," "Team Sunrise Steps." A specific name people recognize beats a generic one.

Quick tip Skip apostrophes and quotation marks in the name — call it OBriens 5K or New Years Reset and you're all set.

Start date and end date (required)

Pick them from the calendar. A few weeks is a great length for a first challenge: long enough for the miles to add up, but short enough to keep everyone's attention the whole way through.

Goal in miles (optional, but recommended)

A shared target gives everyone something to aim at — "let's hit 30 miles this month" is a lot more fun to chase than an open-ended log. Just enter the number (30). And aim for something reachable: a goal your group actually hits feels like a win for everyone. (More on choosing the right number in a separate guide.)

Description (optional)

A line about what it is and who it's for. Nice to have, not required.

A completed Create your own event form with an event name, start and end dates, a 30-mile goal, and a short description filled in — A finished event — only the name and dates are required; the goal and description are optional extras.

Hit CREATE THIS EVENT and you're live! Your challenge is up and running on Miles with Friends, and you're already in it as the organizer — so there's no need to add yourself.

Part 2: Invite your friends (about 8 minutes)

This is what makes your event a real motivational challenge instead of a checklist. Head back to MY EVENTS, pick your new event from the dropdown, and open the Invite tab.

You'll invite friends by email, and there's a ready-to-go message waiting for you with your challenge name and a join link built in. Add a friend's email, drop in a personal note if you like ("doing a little walking thing this month — come join me!"), and hit send. Repeat for each person you want in.

The Invite tab on Miles with Friends showing a pre-written invitation email with the event name, a personal invitation code, and a join link, plus a field to enter a friend's email address — The Invite tab gives you a ready-to-send email — your event name, join link, and personal code are already built in.

A few things that make a first challenge click

Start with a few of the right people. You don't need a big crowd. Four or five friends, family members, or coworkers who'll show up make a better challenge than a long list. Invite the people you'd most enjoy doing this with.
Pick people you'll see anyway. Inviting folks you already text or run into makes it easy to follow up with a "hey, jump in!" — and a friendly in-person nudge is the most effective invite there is.
Joining is quick. When friends click your link, they set up a free account and they're in — dropped straight into your challenge. A quick "it only takes a second to join" heads-up helps any first-timers.

That's it — you're off collecting miles!

A couple of minutes to set it up, a few more to bring your people in, and you've got a real, personalized fitness challenge going. From here it's the good stuff: logging miles, watching the leaderboard climb, and cheering each other on.